Royals earn their Spurs

TOTTENHAM boss Glenn Hoddle sang the praises of Reading after his international superstars were given a run for their money in last night's record-breaking pre-season friendly.

The Premiership giants chalked up a 2-0 win courtesy of goals from Uruguay ace Gus Poyet and a last-gasp strike from Ukraine international Sergei Rebrov.

But Hoddle was delighted by Royals, who offered stiff resistance in front of a crowd of 21,874 - a club record for a pre-season friendly.

The Spurs boss said: "It was an excellent work-out and an ideal game for us in front of a fantastic crowd.

"It just shows the potential of this stadium and the area.

"Reading were very unlucky not to get up last season, but hopefully Alan (Pardew) gets his just rewards this year.

"To have a Second Division ground full for a pre-season shows the passion in this country and even Poyet couldn't believe it.

"When he came out he laughed and said to (Maurico) Tarrico ‘could you imagine this many people at a Division 2 ground in Argentina or Uruguay - it's another world!'"

Royals started the game very brightly and looked like they were going to cause the mighty Spurs plenty of problems.

However, despite superb work from the impressive James Harper, the home side struggled to make any real impact on the Spurs goal.

And Pardew admitted: "We tried to stick to what we are trying to achieve and in some respects we did it very well against a team who are not an ordinary Premier League side - I said before they will finish in the top six.

"I had some outstanding performances - Phil Whitehead in particular, carried off from last year.

"I thought we lacked a bit of penetration, there wasn't a lot of movement and the two strikers (Martin Butler and Anthony Rougier) could have got at them a little more.

"Maybe because it was Tottenham they thought they'd better not, but that won't be the case when we come up against teams who are at the same level as us.

"I thought James Harper was excellent for 60 minutes and Alex Smith did well in his first game at Madejski, but I was most happy with the crowd of 21,000 for a friendly.

"I don't know how many Spurs fans there were, but 15,000 must have been Reading and I'm overjoyed with that.

"Spurs kept with their best team and they slowly ground us down. They had a 15-minute spell after half-time where they were awesome and it was a joy to watch and hopefully my players can take something out of that, especially the crossing which I thought was a revelation - completely different to ours."

Tactically Reading never made any special provision to thwart Spurs as Pardew wanted to see how his side could handle a team playing with wing backs.

He added: "Our aims were to try and deal with their formation as best we could.

"It would have been so easy for me to match them up and just hold them off and I know we could have done that and I might if we come up against them in the FA Cup.

"But I just wanted to try and keep our shape and see what happened

."They did pull us apart a bit but I hadn't done any tactical work on them.

"I just wanted to do what we normally do. Some things worked some didn't but overall considering the opposition I was very pleased.